17 percent increase in online enrolment!

From the Chronicle:

Colleges saw a 17 percent increase in online enrollment, with more than one in four students taking at least one online course in the fall of 2008, according to the findings of an annual survey published on Tuesday by the Sloan Consortium.
The growth rate eclipsed last year's 12-percent increase and dwarfed the 1.2 percent growth rate of the overall higher-education student population. The report, which has become a widely cited benchmark of distance learning, found a total of more than 4.6-million online students overall. That's up from about 3.9 million the previous year.
Despite this surge, the data suggest that not enough institutions have taken online education into account as they conduct planning around issues like how to deal with budget cuts and space shortages, says A. Frank Mayadas, a special adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
"They have to wake up and begin to think about this as a strategic item," Mr. Mayadas says.

Wake up, yes.  But, what if the people reading this are the ones who are already awake about online learning?  Who will wake up those who refuse to get up? :)
More so when that same news item also includes this:

Fewer than one-third of chief academic officers think that their faculty members accept the "value and legitimacy" of online education, a perception that hasn't change much in the past six years. (Another survey, released in 2009, also reflected broad faculty suspicion about the quality of online courses.)